Friday, May 29, 2015

Conrad Black seems to belong to the crotchety-old-man, a
plague-on-both-their-houses school of thought. In that he follows David
Goldman, aks Spengler who has even-handedly attacked both
Democratic and Republicans for their foreign policy follies.

Of course, being a crotchety old man does not disqualify
anyone from offering a wise opinion. We do not ordinarily think of the elderly
as possessing wisdom—we think of them as having lost their youth—but in the best
cases wisdom accrues with age. Experience is an excellent teacher.

Better to heed the words of those older and wiser than to
slobber over the empty thoughts of celebrities.

In a recent National Review article Black took up a question
that I have often had occasion to opine on. He addressed the decline in
American prestige around the world. It’s not about how much the world’s people
like us or don’t. It’s about how much they do or do not respect us.

One hastens to mention that, in pondering your vote in the
next presidential election, you should keep in mind that the world is watching
and that the world is judging America by the quality of its leaders.

No nation can long function as world leader if it keeps
electing presidents who do not command respect.

In the last two presidential elections America lost
considerable prestige by electing an incompetent bumbler. If it next elects an
equally incompetent bumbler, a woman who does not inspire respect, its prestige
will take yet another tumble.

Polls show that a majority of Americans consider Hillary
Clinton a strong leader. One must conclude that most Americans are suffering
from a severe mental defect. Or else, that we, collectively do not have a clue
about what constitutes strength or leadership.

As for the current occupant of the White House, Black
observes:

As
President Obama and his entourage and imperishable following persevere in their
conviction that this president’s benign championship of non-intervention, arms
control, and giving rogue states the benefit of the doubt is winning hearts and
minds to a new conception of a kindly, detached America, it is clearer every
week that this administration’s foreign policy is contemplated with
astonishment and contempt by practically everyone else.

Fair minded to a fault, Black provides us with a list of the
foreign policy failures of previous presidents, going back to Jimmy Carter:

President
Carter was instrumental in removing the shah of Iran, the greatest ally the
U.S. has ever had in the Middle East, not excluding Anwar Sadat and the
Israelis, and the most enlightened leader in the 5,000-year history of Persia.
President Reagan maintained civilized relations with Iraq in order to be on
normal terms with one of the major Persian Gulf countries, and it may be a long
time before there is agreement on exactly what Saddam Hussein concluded from
his meeting with U.S. ambassador to Iraq April Glaspie on July 25, 1990, before
subjugating Kuwait. (Ms. Glaspie’s next overseas posting was consul general in
Cape Town.) President George H. W. Bush conducted a masterly coalition response
to evict Saddam from Kuwait, but left him in power in Baghdad, massacring Kurds
and putting on airs of triumph before the Muslim world. President Clinton
pursued his zeal for nuclear non-proliferation to the point of imposing
embargoes on both India and Pakistan when they acquired that capability,
leaving the U.S. without any country to speak with in a normal and constructive
manner all through South Asia between Jordan and Thailand. The initial campaign
against terrorists, which attracted universal support and has been largely
successful, mutated into overthrowing Saddam Hussein. George W. Bush promoted
democracy to the point of destabilizing the friendly governments of Egypt and
Pakistan and securing the democratic election victories of the anti-democratic
Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon. By dismissing the entire government and
armed forces and police of Iraq, 400,000 men unemployed but retaining their
weapons and ammunition, Bush ensured the country’s descent into an unorganized
bloodbath, and President Obama, by his abrupt withdrawal, ensured the preeminence,
in most of the country, of Iran, and a slugging match between Iranian proxies
and the Islamic State death squads.

As opposed to many of his predecessors Barack Obama’s
foreign policy was driven by leftist ideology. Seeing America as the cause of
most of the world’s ills, he apologized for the country, abased himself in
front of other world leaders and withdrew from the international stage.

If America causes all that is bad, America’s absence can
only be a force for good.

By supporting leftist causes and disparaging traditional
American allies, Obama also sowed confusion.

Black explains it well, while also underscoring the fact
that Republican foreign policy mavens did not seem to have any better ideas:

At the
outset of his administration in 2009, Mr. Obama gave portentous addresses in
Cairo and in Ghana that indicated that he thought all previous frictions that
the U.S. had had with Middle Eastern and African countries could be laid at the
door of the formerly entirely Caucasian and Judeo-Christian leadership, and
that, given his more multiracial and multi-sectarian ancestry and orientation,
these frictions had become obsolete. It was as if the president imagined that
relations between states were ultimately determined otherwise than on the basis
of their interests; that pigmentation and the religious and racial connections
of ancestors could seriously influence interstate relations. Having abandoned
George W. Bush’s sophomoric confidence in the panacea of democracy in countries
inhospitable to it, Obama destabilized the Egyptian dictatorship of Hosni
Mubarak while turning a blind eye to the brutal theft of reelection in Iran by
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. He thus completed the elevation of the Muslim Brotherhood
in Egypt (the Arab world’s 900-pound gorilla for 75 years), which ransacked the
Israeli embassy, poured sophisticated ordnance into Gaza for Hamas to use
against Israel, and subverted the democratic constitution, Allende-style
(Chile, 1973). Even when overthrown by the military high command that the
Muslim Brotherhood had itself installed, the Muslim Brotherhood continued to be
solicitously referred to not only by the Obama administration but by prominent
Republican senators such as John McCain and Lindsey Graham.

It is a
painful and notorious narrative. The Obama administration believes that U.S.
involvement in the world has been largely harmful: Obama has decried the lack
of alliance consultation by Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill as they
directed the war efforts of the Western Allies “brandies in hand.” He has
apologized for President Truman’s use of the atomic bomb against Japan and for
President Eisenhower’s approval of the removal of (the wildly incompetent if
not mad) Mohammad Mosaddegh as leader of Iran and the return of the shah. This
was an astonishing sequence of criticisms of three of America’s most
distinguished leaders and arguably the most generally esteemed statesman in the
world of the past 150 years (Churchill).

After decades worth of presidential incompetence, or, more
precisely, voter insouciance, we are facing an ungodly mess.

Black concludes:

America’s
traditional allies have lost all respect for American foreign-policy-making,
and have certainly not replaced it with any sense of purpose of their own. As
the U.S. cranks up to another presidential election, and rhetoric echoes loudly
around the country about “the greatest nation in human history” (certainly a
fair description in many respects), Americans should be aware of how the
country is perceived by foreigners. Never mind the usual international-Left
caricature of a police-run, coast-to-coast shooting gallery in the rubble heaps
of many American cities (and there is unfortunately some truth to this version
also), it has almost become, as President Nixon warned, “a pitiful, helpless
giant.”

You mean like the Chinese thinking it's okay to build islands as force projection bases in the busy shipping lanes of the South China Sea? Our President tells graduates of one U.S. (seafaring) military college that climate change is now our greatest global threat. The Chinese are so worried about the swelling oceans that they've decided to get into island-building! What does that tell you?

You look at who has benefitted from the Obama foreign policy? His indecision, rapprochement (or reset) or withdrawal? Let's see, it's the "junior varsity" squad of global villains... aside from ISIS, you have Iran, Cuba, China, North Korea, and Putin's proto-Soviet belligerence. I guess Obama hated Bush's "Axis of Evil" speech so much that he decided HE was powerful enough to make friends with them... to bring these long-time enemies to heel under the power of his soothing oratorical spell (Greek columns notwithstanding).